Certainly it shows its influence in most of the surviving literature from the very beginning of the Augustan period. Not a little of Virgil's power can be seen to depend on his absorption of the Ciceronian rules for producing effective arguments, although the technique is never allowed to take precedence. Ovid's Heroides display most clearly the young poet's delight in all the devices of rhetoric, which he had learnt in the schools, gaining a distinction on which the elder Seneca comments. The Heroides are essentially similar compositions, depending for their success on immense dexterity in saying the same thing in an endless variety of different ways, as heroine after heroine laments her unhappy lot. Much the same is true of many elements in the Metamorphoses, particularly the actual descriptions of transformations of men or women into other creatures or plants. The ability to play this game with such unwearying freshness makes Ovid the perfect example of how the techniques of the schools could best be exploited in the most unlikely literary forms.
The vitality and originality which characterizes the literature of the Augustan age declines sharply during the succeeding reigns. In prose, Valerius Maximus, as much a devotee of the rhetorical schools as the elder Seneca himself, produces a series of books containing exempla of virtues and vices for the orator to exploit in his own compositions; but he has been unable to resist treating them in the fashionable rhetorical manner, often at the cost of clarity, in his attempt to avoid the monotony which such a catalogue might involve. It must have been very difficult for the aspiring speaker to incorporate such sophisticated material into his own speeches. At about the same time, Velleius Paterculus sets out to relate the history of the world in two books (an understandable reaction to Livy and Diodorus); but the need to cover the same stories, which generations of historians had dealt with in their own ways, constrains him to use all the devices of technique in pursuit of his own sort of originality. He is no master, as Ovid had been; and his account of the Batde of Actium (11.85) illustrates excellendy the deployment of ingenious language which fails to leave any impression either of what really happened or of its historical significance. The batde had presumably been dealt with in Rabirius' lost epic and perhaps in Varius Rufus' panegyric of Augustus, as it was by the author of the De Bello Actiaco, which survives in papyrus fragments;17 even Livy may have found it advisable to treat the subject as an excuse for rhetorical display rather than as an account of tactical moves and individual prowess. After these, and who knows how many other versions, there was little left for Velleius to do except to search for paradoxes as the schools had taught and the fashion demanded.
For the younger Seneca, trained in the manner illustrated by his father's works, the exposition of his chosen subject, philosophy, as a guide to life, a purpose of some weight and significance, continually tended to be dominated by the need to express the same doctrine again and again in striking and memorable phrases. The Epistulae Morales, generally regarded as the most successful and attractive of his voluminous works, suffer from something like the same fault as Ovid's Heroides: that, no matter how deeply felt, the subjects are so repetitive that they are kept going, up to the grand total of 124, by ingenuity rather than anything else. The same is true of the philosophical dialogues, enlivened though they are by striking exempla, as if to demonstrate how Valerius Maximus' anecdotes might be applied to a good purpose. Novelty of expression is the more necessary as Seneca is not searching for philosophical truth, as Plato does, so much as preaching an accepted code, enriched from Epicurus and elsewhere, to assist the reader in coping with the problems of life, and doing so in such a way as to seize and retain the attention by force of language. Apart from modifications of traditional Stoicism, Seneca, like most Silver Age writers, makes very little positive addition to what has been said before.
The nine tragedies which have come down to us under Seneca's name share enough of the characteristics of his prose works to make the slightly uncertain attribution of most, at least, virtually certain. Derived obliquely from Greek tragedies, mostly extant works by Euripides or Aeschylus, they have been totally adapted to the taste of the day, in which stage performance was a minor consideration, if indeed contemplated at all. Stoic doctrines, with the usual love of paradox, colour the speeches of kings, queens, commoners and choruses alike; and the dramatic flow is almost entirely sacrificed to the succession of telling sententiae, few of them appropriate to speaker or circumstances. Topics recur in speech after speech in different plays (freedom and tyranny, death as an escape, the wise man's invulnerability), but so skilfully organized that the sameness is at least masked at the first reading. Although limited by the setdngs of the plays, the ideas and expressions
" Cf. H. Benario, "The Carmen de Bella Aetiaeoin ANRIP II, 30.3 (1983) 1656-62. The fragments preserved in fact deal with events in Egypt some time after the battle and exhibit a freedom in imaginative fictions which do not suggest a composition as early as the Augustan age proper.
are much the same as those of the prose works, only made more remote from the reader by transference to the unreal heroic world of Greek mythology.
The same combination of rhetoric and philosophy shows itself inevitably in Seneca's nephew, Lucan; although for him philosophy is not a major preoccupation, but simply a source for ideas and commonplaces, together with the accepted link of Stoicism with the republicanism which colours the narrative of the Bellum Civile. This story, already related in prose by Pollio and Livy, is made the field for the same sort of cleverness as we find in Seneca, with rather too many memorable phrases for more than a handful to deserve remembering, and with almost unlimited skill in making the same ideas sound fresh each time they occur. Lucan's originality lies partly in his choice of a subject from relatively recent history (although almost from the start poets had followed the laureates of Alexander the Great in writing short-lived accounts of Rome's glorious victories or of the achievements of the latest military hero, whether Marius or Caesar, Octavian or Germanicus), partly in his deliberate rejection of the conventional Homeric gods so busily employed by Virgil. This may be regarded as a concession to Stoicism, allowing Fate to play the dominant part rather than the eccentric and partial Olympians.